SHUT UP BARBIE has rarely been shown and is a "rediscovered" film, so to speak. The film is the filmmaker's (Vincent Grenier) reaction to the obsession a seven year old girl has with her Barbie Dolls. The film builds on the Barbie Dolls' referential content and limits. While innocuous at first, the humor eventually becomes rather unsettling and tragic. Ann Knutson plays the role of the mother Barbie Doll.

Project at 18 fps. This film is concerned with the projected, not just light or the emulsion or the illusion or the projector or the camera, but all of them. The surface of the film, the grain, is remembered when a similar but illusionistic surface appears (just as magnified), crossing the frame. Other times the grain is left to itself. There are the idiosyncratic focusing qualities of shadows acting as diaphragms inside the image. The elusive background confounds itself with the foreground. The notions of appearances and disappearances transform themselves in notions of time. Made with a grant from the Canada Council.

Project at 24 fps In WORLD IN FOCUS, the screen becomes the two-dimensional support of an amazingly versatile three-dimensional object (the Atlas) which contains in turn two-dimensional pictures of other three-dimensional objects. The physicality of the book offers an area no less real than its language (i. e. text, pictures, etc.) which is itself presenting a dislocated image "of the world." To look at the objectness of the book is in fact to look at the real thing, something which is contained in what it portends to describe. The film inventories and builds both on a number of camera/book affinities and the ramifications of the resulting deconstruction of the book's "language." Made with a grant from the Canada Council.

Made with a grant from the Canada Council: filmed with the help of Ann Knutson. In X, a black line can be perceived as delineation or as a shape in itself. It can also be a slit through which one can feel the background; or it sometimes becomes undifferentiated from one of the areas it delineates when, because of light changes, the areas become black as well. A shape which may seem to cross the frame horizontally can just as well suddenly appear to do so vertically or even go backward and forward in the film space. The rectangle of the screen itself metamorphoses into a trapezoid, temporarily stretching the black mass surrounding it.

With special assistance of Ann Knutson. "Grenier's great skill is that by means of shifts of focus, by subtly altering light level and shadow, by moving the camera axis, by playing upon grain, contrast and surface texture, he can provoke constant mystery as to what exactly we've just seen, are seeing, will see next." -- Simon Field, Time Out, May 1980 "One striking aspect of INTERIEUR INTERIORS (TO A. K.) is that each specification of a spatial reading has a short perceptual life. If it is not renewed and reinforced the viewer soon loses it and is confronted again by an indeterminate space, which can be changed almost at will. Grenier relies on two kinds of factors to achieve these temporary specifications: motion, which is itself unambiguous if in a direction parallel to the screen and which automatically defines a recession; and the insertion of a recognizable element. When the two factors appear together, even for a moment, the cinematic space is transformed into one of representation." -- Graham Weinbren and Christine N. Brinckman, Millennium Film Journal "... And although we may repeatedly be laced back through the spatial ambiguities and the similarities of light reflection (a kind of sensuous and tendentious voyage), what Grenier leaves us with is finally not the realization that lines and shapes become objects, nor that objects deliquesce into abstraction, but that both object and abstraction can be accessible at the same moment. That is what is so demanding and so unrelenting." -- Martha Haslanger, Downtown Revue, Winter 1980

Project at 24 fps The precisions and idiosyncrasies of movement associated with domestic activities are closely stared at; or as it sometimes happens, watched carefully through the peripheral vision. This while rhyming, is done in alternance, thus creating sudden rushes in the mind while spaces collapse. Also, light burns wedges in this film, recalling... Made with a grant from the Canada Council and the Creative Artists Public Service Program (CAPS). With special assistance of Ann Knutson.

"Grenier's D'APRES MEG, departs from the routine of structuralist cinema. Through the repetition and fragmentation of physical gestures, wild sound, and snatches of conversation, Grenier elicits narrative possibilities from otherwise disparate elements. Repetition is after all, a form of insistence. In D'APRES MEG, small hand gestures are microscopically observed in their everyday context, a garden conversation, a construction site, a gallery setting. By taking our common peripheral vision of events seriously, Grenier produces an evocative enigma. From these images and bits of conversations, which are equally mundane, a new kind of disinterested seeing can be engaged. One that does not reflect meaning as invite it through repetition." -- Raphael Bendahan, Vanguard, Summer 1985. Curated exhibition: Special program: "Cities Territories" Oberhausen Short Film Festival 1999.

Tall buildings and cars are shot through the Kinemacolor process, variable color filters and a water lens. Sturdiness jousts with fragility, past with present, alienation with tenderness, abrasiveness with sensuality, red with green. The camera is moving in the slick of space. Shapes vibrate selectively out of the image; others at different points in space and in turn, vibrate or flash as vibrations also vary in rhythms and intensity. The Kinemacolor process was use in 1915 to obtain fairly illusionistic colors from black and white films by filming and projecting them through synchronized, alternating red and green filters. This film, while already in color, takes advantage of many of the particularities of the system. Funded by the Canada Council.

Made from material I collected through the years when I went back to visit my parents at l'Ile d'Orleans, Quebec. It includes both home movie and other types of footage which peculiarly inform on each other. In this film the camera I, in extension with home movie reality, is a living, participating entity. The film represents an endearing but removed artifact, a strange contradiction between loneliness and frozenness. -- V. G., notes from Collective for Living Cinema, Nov. 1984

I had been looking for someone's unnerving encounter, that conversation that one just couldn't get out of their head, the kind of event that leaves one still debating out loud while walking in the streets or doing one's tidies in the bathroom. After interviewing a few people, I found Lisa Black who obliged with one of her own and became the film's main character. A situation with many angles; the telling, the filming, the final projection event... YOU is an imaginary fictionalized you in a whimsical space. It is the still live residue of the broken relationship Lisa is here confronting. A parallel actor, the film is in the business of reinterpreting. As a result the film is closer to a psychic space, an ironic place where distance is also intimate and a measure of insight. Lisa Black is a member of theater 00bleck in Chicago. Award: Director's Choice, 1990 Black Maria Film and Video Festival -- Screening: Society for Cinema Studies Conference, 1991, UCLA 11th Chicago Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, 1992 -- Orlando Film Festival -- Independent Focus, WNET -- London Film Festival 1992, "Art and Experiment" -- 15th Denver International Film Festival,1992 -- 6th New York Lesbian and Gay Experimental Film Festival -- Munich Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, Enoy Arena, Fall 1992. Purchased by: The collections of the Canadian Art Bank and Sinking Creek Film Ce 15th International Festival of Films on Art, Montr&eacute;al, March 1997.

A film about the dynamic of assumptions as seen through the struggle of a gay man who has recently been told that he is HIV positive and who, in his own way, tries to come to terms with the news. The film eschews the usual talking head and focuses on the peculiar occasion for examining anew as brought on by disconnectedness. In the process, questions of identity, one's sense of reality, the day to day and social tyrannies end up implicating the viewer intimately as well. Awards: Michael Moore Award for Best Documentary, Ann Arbor Film Festival, 1992, -- Best Experimental Documentary, 1992, -- 16th Atlanta Film/ & Video Festival. Cash awards: 1992 Black Maria Film & Video Festival -- 23rd Sinking Creek Film Celebration. Screenings: Screenings: 11th Chicago Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, 1992 - Orlando Film Festival -- Independent Focus, WNET -- London Film Festival 1992, "Art and Experiment" - 15th Denver International Film Festival, 1992 -- 6th New York Lesbian and Gay Experimental Film Festival -- Munich Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, Enoy Arena, Fall 1992. Purchased by: The collections of the Canadian Art Bank and Sinking Creek Film Celebration.

A video portrait of my friend, Susan Weisser and of her rapport with 13 year old son Billy and seventeen year old daughter Amanda. The video, divided in two sections used as a premise the reconstruction of her daily rituals with first the son and then the daughter. Enactments, accounts, confidences and spirited arguments freely crisscross each other within the dynamic that my presence and that of the camera create. Great opportunities ensued for live tensions in the framing of sounds and visuals; a sort of enchanted construction from the fanciful revelations of the everyday. Award: Second prize, 1996 Black Maria Film & Video Festival Screening: Symposium on Independent Film & Video at the University of Colorado, Boulder, June 1996. WNET REEL NEW YORK, Summer 1998. Purchased by: Collection of New York University

This film was partly shot in Kinemacolor. A process which was used in 1915 to obtain fairly illusionistic colors from black & white films by filming and projecting them through synchronized, red and green filters.

With Etienne Z. Grenier & Mary Zebell. MIRACLE GROW is a personal piece with elements of a home movie. Originally shot in Mini DV, edited and transferred to film without leaving the digital realm, the film is an inventory of a growing baby as he struggles to gain mastery of his limbs. As the father the filmmaker attempts to insert himself within this well worn and taboo subject and redefine it. As in his other works, the images are composed and structured to lead us within other realms of thoughts.

With Betty Ostrov, Susan Weisser and Brendan Murphy. Shot in mini DV and Hi 8 and edited on a digital desktop workstation. A collage of distant worlds, lost and not yet learned, memories and functions as playful instincts. An Alzheimer afflicted woman's distant reactions in intercut with the mischievous antic of a four year old looking into, scratching and feeding the screen.

A mystery play of transitory exile and a beguiling reunion. An introspective and personal piece that speaks of apparently vague but relevant items such as: being away from home, time/space travel, in-between stages/state, bridges, merging, mirrors, skeletons, presence/lack thereof, humor of the ordinary, being plugged-in, contained, defined, homing. CAPTUR? attempts to look at the evidence, to unravel a puzzling mystery.

Contains the following two films: Color Study, Slaterville NY (2000); and Winter Collection (2000). See descriptions for individual titles below. Color Study, Slaterville NY, (2000), VHS, color, sound, 4-1/2 min. Digital image manipulated and edited using Digital Origin Edit DV software. Stereo sound. Original format Mini DV. A humorous, digitally induced meditation on colors, motion and space from a few frames of road side fall panorama in upstate NY. "It is interesting to think about COLOR STUDY in relation to the purely cinematic-photochemical nature of a work like Kurt Kren's ASYL with its multiplicity of delicate composite imagery and overlapping seasons that create a feeling of all time being simultaneous. In ASYL, solar light cohabitates with the film--the emulsion receives singes and burns that inscribe the image and are reconstituted in projection as muted radiance. In COLOR STUDY, a cat's eye like chatoyancy of splattered color, the precise mimicry of natural color combined with unnatural color fields, creates and breaks illusion, Color manufactures a kind of implied time lapse where it does not technically exist. A spatial jigsaw, combining the autumnal and the verdant. The invented light and color of the digital process creating an acid wash." -- Mark McElhatten